How The Right Marketing Tech Can Turn Your Sailing Ship Into A Battleship

Over the last few years, I’ve taken a some flak from our finance department about how much we spend on SaaS applications for demand gen. It’s roughly one third of our overall demand gen budget. In a nutshell, here are some of the vendors in our martech stack:

Invariably, they all ask the same question “Are all these tools really necessary?” I answer this intriguing question with the following analogy:

One hundred years ago, if you wanted to operate a sailing ship like a clipper or schooner, you would need one hundred men. You would need:

Men to rig the sails

Men to load and fire the cannons

A man up in the crow’s nest looking out for land (or enemy ships)

And finally,

A captain to command and control the vessel.

I recently read that today’s modern combat ships can function with as few as four (4) people:

One man/woman on propulsion

One man/woman on munitions

One man/woman on navigation

And finally, a captain to command and control the vessel.

What does that mean for marketing (specifically demand gen) departments?

ANSWER: I don’t have one hundred people on my marketing ship. I have four. I am competing with organizations that have three times that number. In the case of Oracle/IBM/SAP, ten times that number. That means I need to use computerization and automation to turn my small but mighty marketing ship into a battleship.